The British economy is built on flimsy and unreliable foundations. We should be making more things
Four years ago I attended the opening ceremony of BMW Welt in Munich. This sensational vortex of a building is where you go should you feel like a little Freude am Fahren (Joy in Driving, BMW's slogan) to collect your gleaming new German car. With its bars, music, art and apfelstrudel, this corporate shrine was designed to attract 850,000 visitors a year. In its first 12 months, it drew 2.2 million – 900,000 more than Neuschwanstein, Ludwig II's fairy tale castle and, once upon a time, Bavaria's top attraction. The highlight of the opening ceremony was a religious service conducted by archdiocesan clergy. As clouds of incense rose to the high glass vaults, there could be no doubt: in Bavaria, BMW is an ersatz religious cult.
In Britain, consumerism is not so much a religion as the echt meaning of life German philosophers have worked so hard to define. Something close to a medical condition, too. We have become concupiscent and chronic shopaholics. As increasingly we have lost the will to make things, so we have bought ever more stuff – usually from China – that we grow bored with quickly and hurl into our world-famous landfill sites. The more stuff we fail to make and instead buy from overseas, the bigger our balance of payment deficit grows. And, as our economy suffers, the unhappier and more bored, restless and greedy we appear to become.
BMW Welt may well be a temple of consumerism, yet right behind this alluring 3D sales spiel is the carmaker's 3-series production plant, where some 9,000 "associates" take genuine pride in making the cars that the world beyond Bavaria clearly wants in ever-increasing numbers. In the third quarter of this year, BMW's profits were, at £1.4bn, 23% up over the same period in 2010. The company sold 9% more cars than it did last year, manufacturing a record total of 1.23m. Significantly, this includes figures for Mini and Rolls-Royce, both German marques today.
In continuing not just to make things but to enjoy making things well, Germany remains Europe's economic powerhouse. "Our economy is looking very robust", Philipp Rösler, Germany's minister for economics and technology, told Handelsblatt, the business newspaper, this week. BMW, Daimler and Audi asked workers to cut short their Christmas holidays to meet rising demand, while 60,000 new jobs in manufacturing are expected to be created in 2012.
Economies like Britain's, based top-heavily on flimsy and unreliable foundations (financial services and shopping), are performing badly. The consumerist free-market economy is failing us; this insatiable monster of our making will bite us very hard in years to come. The alternative, perhaps, is for Britain to learn something from modern Germany. We may balk at the idea of bishops consecrating factories and showrooms, but we might yet want the UK economy to become a dynamic productive, or manufacturing, one rather than the passive consumerist bacchanalia it has become.
Britain is certainly able to make things: we do notably well in hi-tech industries including aerospace, pharmaceuticals and electronics and, remarkably, the country ranks sixth among manufacturing nations – although the trend is downwards. More significantly, the numbers employed in manufacturing have fallen considerably in recent years. In 1994, 4.7 million of us were employed in making things; the latest figure, for 2009, is 2.6 million. So, even if we were to spend as much proportionately as Germany does on research and development to boost the quality of our products, the numbers of people making interesting things we could export at high added value would continue to fall.
We might improve our economic performance through modern manufacturing, rather than by building yet more supermarkets and shopping malls – and the distribution depots, arterial roads and heavyweight lorries needed to serve them. But even then, only a few of us would get to make interesting things. This is sad. Would you prefer stacking shelves in a supermarket to making scientific instruments? Would you prefer building a railway locomotive or an aircraft, to gliding Made in China stuff over the red laser lights of a till in a shop where you have to put up your hand like a schoolchild to ask to be excused?
At its best, the making of things is an all-absorbing activity. It seems odd to have so many people in Britain making things purely as a hobby, when we might be earning our living making high-quality modern products every bit as desirable in their own way as bright new BMWs. The truth is, a consumer or service economy will never make us happy. It is time to curb the shopping, and the environmental destruction this involves, and to rescue ourselves economically, and in terms of wellbeing, through more of us making intelligent, useful and profitable things contentedly and well.